Congratulations to Daniel Hasty and Ashley Hesson, who are the winners of the NWAV 40 Best Student Poster prize! The prize, worth $200, is voted on by NWAV conference attendees. The poster, titled Finding needles in the right haystack: Double modals in medical consultations, was co-authored with Suzanne Evans Wagner and Bob Lannon. Bob represented Verilogue Inc, whose corpus of doctor-patient interactions was used as the data source in the study.

Hasty et al searched for the Southern United States English double modal (DM) construction, e.g. You might could think about losing some weight. This construction is rare in other kinds of recorded speech corpora, such as sociolinguistic interviews, since it is pragmatically favored in service interactions and face-threatening negotiations. Hypothesizing that DMs might occur in doctor-patient talk, Hasty et al searched Verilogue's nationwide corpus of over 45,000 conversations. The search turned up 95 double modals, of which the majority -- surprisingly -- were produced by doctors. The study results also suggested that DMs are most frequent in discussion of and decisions about treatment, in which doctors appear to use DMs to mitigate their instructions to patients.

MSU Sociolinguistics is pleased to welcome seven new undergraduate volunteers who signed up at the recent MSU undergraduate linguistics research fair. Thank you to Kathryn VerPlanck and Bailey Doolittle for promoting us!

There will be an informal gathering tomorrow afternoon (Wednesday November 2nd) at 6pm in A-607 Wells Hall to discuss last weekend's NWAV 40 conference. Many of the 11 MSU students and faculty who attended will be there to share handouts and talk about what we did or didn't find inspiring at the presentations and workshops. Even if you weren't at the conference, please feel welcome to join us. There will be pizza...